My Baby
by sapphire-child
Summary: Claire goes to berate Charlie for not watching Aaron properly and finds herself comforting him instead.


Title: My Baby  
Original post date: 19th December 2005  
Spoilers: Season one  
Summary: Claire goes to berate Charlie for not watching Aaron properly and finds herself comforting him instead.  
Disclaimer: Lost still isn't mine. I'm trying hard to bid for it on eBay atm though.

* * *

Claire was frantic. 

She'd asked Charlie to take care of Aaron whilst she went for a walk – making sure not to take too long – and when she had returned, they were both gone.

'Charlie? Has anyone seen Charlie? He had Aaron with him...'

She checked all the beach shelters in turn, straining her ears for the sound of a baby crying and startling many of the residents with her sudden appearance and ongoing monologue of questions that nobody had the answer to.

'Why doesn't anyone know where the hell Charlie is?' Claire yelled at one point, her nerves almost at breaking point when one of the other survivors chipped in with, 'Hey isn't he the guy who was looking after your kid?'

'Yes,' Claire turned to them immediately and took a step towards them. 'Have you seen him? Where is he? Does he still have Aaron? Wait a minute...what do you mean I was /I looking after Aaron?'

The woman who had spoken took an uncertain step backwards from Claire. 'I don't know. I saw you give your baby to him earlier and...well then you disappeared. Is he...is he your husband?'

Claire gaped at the woman for a moment before turning and heading in the opposite direction. _Her shelter._ The realisation hit her like a ton of bricks and she found herself almost running towards it. Surely Charlie would have come back here if Aaron was making a fuss...

Claire rushed over to her shelter, pushing through a gaggle of chattering women on the way and earning herself a few scowls and shaken heads. After a quick glance around however, Claire realised that Aaron was in his cradle, fast asleep and safe. Charlie however was nowhere to be found.

Something close to a tidal wave of relief washed over Claire as she gently picked her son up and held him close to her, allowing herself to breathe again. He snuffled slightly and cuddled into her but did not wake as she began to scan her immediate surroundings for a sign of Charlie. Where the hell was he?

Finding no sign of him, Claire set off purposefully down the beach, swinging her head back and forth between the water to the jungle, hoping to see Charlie somewhere but she soon realised just how impossible this was. Everyone seemed to be down at the beach today, milling around and chattering excitedly to one another and getting in her way. It would be almost impossible to find Charlie amongst all of them, she could hardly see anybody she knew in the onslaught of people.

She supposed something of importance was happening, a fact that was reinforced by the sound of Jack's voice, strong and authoritarian on the breeze. She found she didn't care much, all that mattered to her was that Aaron was safe and that she go and kick Charlie's arse for abandoning her son after she'd been so trusting with him – despite barely even knowing him. Theoretically, she'd only known him for only a couple of weeks and in that time he had attached himself to her as firmly as a limpet.

She didn't count the time before her amnesia as a part of their relationship, although her trust in him was obviously due in part to whatever their affiliation had been during that time, and he was still one of the only people who showed an interest in her, which was refreshing. She was used to people avoiding her eye and staring at her belly bump or (more recently) Aaron and then edging away slyly.

And now he had practically disappeared off the face of the earth, leaving her son to fend for himself. Exasperated beyond all measure and feeling increasingly self righteous, Claire looked up and down the beach once more and then did a double take.

Much further along down the beach, a long distance away from all the others, was a lone figure huddled over a guitar.

Claire set off down the beach feeling decidedly pissed off – which only made her move faster. When somebody offered to watch your three-week-old son, she thought to herself, it's an unwritten rule that they can't just wander off to play their bloody guitar because they felt like it. What if something had happened to Aaron? What if he'd been stolen away again by the Others or dragged off by a wild animal? Claire knew that as much as Charlie insisted that Rousseau was completely crazy and needed to spend the rest of her days in a straight jacket spaced out on some drug or other, somebody had certainly stolen the two of them away and Claire still felt edgy sometimes when she was in the jungle – she knew they'd be back again, sooner or later. And after she'd heard rumours that there were Polar Bears in the jungle – although she didn't quite believe that there could be Polar Bears on a tropical island, there was nothing to say it wasn't true – that made her all the more paranoid. After all the other weird stuff she'd seen here, that she was slowly starting to remember…well who knew! There could be a whole tribe of flying monkeys living up in the mountains and they didn't even know about it...

Claire halted her internal monologue and stopped walking for a second so she could collect her thoughts for a moment before pressing on, _don't get too carried away Claire_, angrily kicking the sand before her. It wasn't that she didn't like the beach, it was just that the sand got _everywhere_, especially into places that she _really_ didn't need sand.

'Charlie!' she called out when she was within earshot of him. 'CHARLIE!'

He didn't even look up, even when she was right in front of him and began yelling.

'What the hell did you think you were doing, leaving Aaron all alone like that? You said you were going to watch him!' Charlie turned his head away from her and Claire felt her anger escalate. 'Look at-look at me when I'm talking to you! What did you think you were...'

'My guitar broke,' Charlie muttered.

Claire stopped yelling and stared at him.

'I'm sorry, what?'

Charlie put his head up slightly, eyes still down, and repeated himself. 'I said; my guitar broke.'

Claire gaped soundlessly for a moment but then recovered her voice swiftly. 'Well you'll be able to fix it won't you? That's no excuse for just _abandoning_ Aaron...'

'It _can't_ be fixed,' Charlie's eyes flickered up to Claire's and just that simple act of making eye contact with him was enough to give Claire pause.

She'd never seen his eyes like this before. Having seen Charlie in a range of emotions ranging from irreversibly happy to earnest, nervous, angry, upset and then sliding down into the realms of despair and misery, Claire knew that the emotion on his face right now was beyond all she had seen before. Perhaps it was the fact that his normally blue eyes had dulled down to a watery, inconsistent grey or maybe it was the tears that were trailing into his beard but mostly it was the way he looked at her, blankly, like he didn't quite believe what he'd just said because admitting it would mean the death of a part of him.

'Are you sure?' Claire sank to her knees beside him in the sand and freed a hand to touch the neck of his guitar gently. 'Maybe John could...?'

'No,' Charlie ran his hand up the neck of the guitar and showed her where one of the pegs had snapped off quite cleanly and then the broken strings. Claire took the broken peg from him and worried it between her thumb and forefinger. 'She'll never play again unless I can somehow get her to a bloody good repair shop.' He smiled bitterly, still crying. 'Because, you know, there's such an abundance of them in the area.'

His eyes dropped back to his guitar again and as he cradled it in his arms, in his lap and as he did so, Claire began to realise why Charlie had been so quick at learning how to hold Aaron properly, how to stop him from crying whilst she was still having troubles sometimes, even now with her maternal instincts kicking in and strengthening every day.

His guitar was, in many ways, like a baby. His baby. He held it firmly but gently, even now when there was no danger of hurting it much more than it already had been, and smoothed his hands over the body of it in an almost sensually slow way...

Claire blinked and shook her head a little to abandon _that_ thought before placing a hand on his shoulder. 'I'm sorry Charlie.' Charlie nodded bleakly and Claire opened her mouth to chastise him for leaving Aaron – if a little more gently than she had been planning too earlier – but found herself unable to do so. Not when he looked so completely miserable – she feared that anything she said might just push him over the edge.

'Yeah well,' he smudged his eyes ineffectually with the back of his hand before looking up at her. 'Never mind that now. I guess I owe you a huge and grovelling apology don't I?'

'What?' Claire blinked, taken aback for a moment before remembering why she had come over in the first place. 'Oh, Charlie...'

'I'm sorry Claire...' he murmured, his eyes were down on the ground again and he sounded so miserable...

'Charlie...'

'...I wasn't thinking straight – I had this stupid thought that you'd come back and see me leaving and it'd be okay or something. It's just my guitar...it's like...well music's just such a big part of me, and my guitar...I already lost it once and found it but now that it's broken...' he shook his head slightly and shut his eyes to blink the tears away before looking up at her again, his voice wretched. 'You know that I would never deliberately leave Aaron alone, I'd never abandon him...I'd never...I'd never...'

Claire actually jumped when he burst into tears, leaning his forehead against the smooth cool edge of his guitar whilst his hands clutched it like it could offer him some form of consolation, muttering apologies to her under his breath _sorry, sorry, sorry…_

'Hey,' Claire said gently and put an awkward arm around his shoulders and squeezed gently. Her other arm was hurting something awful – trying to hold Aaron with just the one arm really wasn't working and the situation made worse by the fact that Aaron had just woken up and was now soft making noises of protest. 'It's okay, I do forgive you. I mean, after all the times you've saved him – both of us, it's healthy to mess up sometimes. Just don't make a habit of it okay?'

Charlie leant against her, still crying and Claire exasperatedly wriggled about till she could hug him properly.

'...Being stupid,' Charlie muttered eventually and looked darkly at the ruined instrument in his hands and then heaved a sigh, trying to regain control of his emotions. 'I'm sorry. I'm acting like such a bloody Nance right now…'

'No,' Claire shook her head vehemently and then rested her temple against his neck. 'It's not stupid at all. I know what it feels like to lose a baby Charlie,'

'A baby?' Charlie did pull away then and looked at her like she was quite insane. 'What do you mean I lost...?' he looked confused for a moment, trying to put it together but then realised she was referring to his guitar and grinned a little. 'Oh! Yeah. Yeah I understand what you mean now. Yeah.' He laughed a little and brushed his final tears away. 'Thanks.'

'That's okay,' Claire reclaimed her arm and hoisted Aaron more securely into both her arms, shushing him gently. 'Just make sure you don't ever do anything like that ever again or I'll kick your arse.' Charlie barked out a laugh. '_And,'_ Claire added. 'I'll never let you take care of Aaron ever again. And I mean that.'

'Well I'll make sure it never happens again then,' Charlie said soberly. 'It just wouldn't be the same without this little one in my life.'

Claire felt a warm glow at this comment and gave Charlie a genuine smile which he returned, if a little shakily. He could be a bit over the top at times but he certainly meant well and when he did overstep his boundaries he usually apologised – assuming Claire told him he'd overstepped of course.

'Come on then,' Claire said after a long moment. 'We should get back. I think something big is happening down on the beach, nearly everyone's there and Jack's got his leader-voice on.'

'I'll be along in a minute,' Charlie patted his guitar gently. 'I just need a few more minutes to say goodbye.'

Claire smiled indulgently at him as she stood. 'Sure.'

She had already gone several more paces than would allow for Charlie to hear her when she turned back and called out to him.

'Hey, Charlie?'

He glanced up and cupped his ear. Obviously he couldn't hear her. She paced a few steps towards him and bit her lip a little as she wondered how he might react to this.

'Do you want to have a funeral for your guitar?'

Charlie's eyebrows quirked when he realised what she meant and he let out an amazed laugh. 'What, seriously?'

'Seriously,' Claire eyed him quizzically. 'Not necessarily bury it as such but we could have a ceremony to farewell it and everything if you'd like.'

Charlie grinned a bit but his eyes were looking decidedly moist again and Claire shifted from foot to foot, the whole issue on tenterhooks for a long moment until he nodded, goofily solemn. 'Okay.'

'Okay. I'll go talk to some people...' Claire tried to suppress a smile at the thought of certain people's faces when she invited them to the funeral of a _guitar_. 'And when you're done here, come and find me and we'll do it.'

'We are gathered here today to mourn the loss of Charlie's guitar,' Locke glanced around at the small assembly. Charlie, Claire, Aaron, Rose, Hurley and – surprisingly – Sawyer, all of them staring solemnly at the "body" which was propped up against a tree, wreathed in flowers – Claire's handiwork. 'It was a good guitar, a good friend of Charlie's and often we could hear it playing here on the island – something to remind us of home.' Claire squeezed Charlie's arm gently in reassurance and he smiled faintly. 'I'm sure that Charlie's guitar will always be remembered and that our memories of … her?' Charlie nodded and Locke gave a small cough before continuing. 'Our memories of her will always be...remembered. Or something to that effect anyway...' Everyone grinned a little but then their serious faces were back in place as Locke gestured at the guitar. 'Charlie? Would you like to say anything?'

Charlie glanced up, nodded slightly and then cleared his throat a little. Everyone listened intently. 'Ethel. Baby, you were the best guitar a bloke could ever wish for. Thanks for surviving so long but I guess this place just kinda got too much for you. I'll never forget you and all the good times we had, in the real world as well as here. Erm...' He hesitated for a moment and then shrugged. 'Amen I guess.'

'Amen,' everyone echoed and Rose crossed herself.

After Charlie had thanked everyone for coming they began to leave slowly, thanking him for inviting them. Sawyer could scarcely contain his mirth but managed to keep it together till he was a little further down the beach. Locke was the last to go, clapping Charlie on the shoulder for a moment before departing.

'Thanks Locke,'

Claire waited till Locke was out of earshot before stepping forward and poking Charlie gently in the shoulder. He turned his eyes away from his gaudily dressed guitar and raised an eyebrow at her.

'_Ethel?'_

A grin spread across his face. 'Yep. First thing that came into my head. Ethel the Acoustic-Electric.'

Claire laughed out loud then slowed it down to a gentle smile. 'Feel better now?'

'Much,' Charlie's arms twitched towards her but then they got the better of him and he pulled Claire to him and put his face into her neck. 'Thank you. I don't know many people who would do something as bizarre as that just to make me feel better – especially not after abandoning your baby.' Claire smiled although he couldn't see it and concentrated her efforts on making sure Aaron didn't get squashed. A moment later however, Charlie had pulled back a little and was tracing a line on her cheek with his thumb, smiling gently into her face. 'You're an amazing person Claire, you know that?'

She tried not to blush as they made their way back down the beach to where everyone else was now gathering around their fires. And as the influx of people enveloped them, Claire didn't feel alone like she usually did. She reached out and caught Charlie's fingers, curling her own notably smaller digits around his. He glanced down but didn't look surprised at this sudden physical contact and his eyes soon found a path for them to walk.

It felt right.


End file.
